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Message: <blockquote data-quote="woodelf" data-source="post: 1582383" data-attributes="member: 10201">But to pull that off, we'd have to build in that step to the whole process--there'd have to *be* advance copies to give to reviewers. And we'd have to somehow get good, professional reviewers--who'd probably need to make their living at reviewing, so that they could afford the time to keep up. Also, most (though not all) of the blurbs you read on the covers of books, and pretty much all of the awards, are there because you're looking at a 2nd, 3rd, 4th, or later printing--often the initial release has much less hype, and from far less prestigious sources, because the book hasn't been out there long enough to get the awards, etc. So long as some combination of consumers, retailers, and distributors keep pushing the RPG industry ever more towards new release and away from backlist, there just aren't going to be 2nd printings of most things. And by the time they win an Origins or Ennie, or whatever, they've often mostly sold through (especially for D20 System supplements), so even stickers aren't that great of an option. Mind you, i *love* the idea of accolades filtering the books a bit, i'm just not sure how it'd happen. Imprints, as someone else observed, are probably more plausible. A publisher needs to simply be very selective about what they printe under a given imprint, and the imprint becomes a mark of quality. This can be the game company's name, but it can also be a label they use just for their "ultra-quality" line. Atlas, Green Ronin, Sword & Sorcery Studios, and Fantasy Flight Games are all, apparently, starting to get that way--they've come up several times in this thread, and in other threads on D20 System products/publishers, as "must check out" publishers. For me, personally, Atlas has managed the one step better: "must get" publisher--if they print it, and it's on a topic i'm interested in, i know it'll be good. Sometimes even if it's on a topic i'm not interested in (or at least thought i wasn't). I just "know" that if Atlas publishes it, it's good. What we need are more imprints like that.</blockquote>

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